Voyager design history?

[Steve Simpkin]

Some HP-12C and Voyager Trivia:
From the HHC 2011 presentation by Dennis Harms on the HP-12Cs 30th anniversary. Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VitFi_KC8cQ

1:15 - The original anticipated product lifespan of the HP-12C was 2 years. They expected to replace it with a Saturn-based Pioneer series calculator shortly after that. They were off by 41 years (so far) with no end of HP-12C production in sight.

15:45- The HP-11C/HP-12C R&D team had 30 core people that developed theses two Voyager models over a 2.5-3 year period. Approx 250 people contributed to the project.

16:06 - [ paraphrasing ] The original design of the Voyager series was a “normal” vertical format like every calculator HP had made previously. Some of the design goals were that it had to fit easily into a shirt pocket and it had to withstand a 1 meter drop on all four corners (like all other HP calculators). Placing the LCD at the top of a vertical format calculator made it difficult to protect the LCD at this time without making the entire calculator bigger so they made in in a horizontal format to have more protection around the display.

The HP-12C has been in continuous production for over 43 years. Although the more recent models use a newer processor that emulates the original "Nut" processor, they are all running the same 44 year old firmware codebase.